This I did, reflecting sadly that if I was to be sacrificed, Tommy must share my fate.

I even thought of passing him on to Bickley, but had no time.

Indeed I could not attract his attention, for Bickley was staring with all his eyes at the nightmare-like spectacle which was in progress about us.

Indeed no nightmare, no wild imagination of which the mind of man is capable, could rival the aspect of its stupendous facts.
Think of them! The unmeasured space of blackness threaded by those globes of ghastly incandescence that now hung a while and now shot upwards, downwards, across, apparently without origin or end, like a stream of meteors that had gone mad.

Then the travelling mountain, two thousand feet in height, or more, with its enormous saucer-like rim painted round with bands of lurid red and blue, and about its grinding foot the tulip bloom of emitted flame.